The present invention relates to an electronic puzzle game and, in particular, it concerns an electronic puzzle game which can be used to demonstrate important mathematical concepts.
A wide variety of puzzle devices are available, including both electronic and mechanical devices. An example of a mechanical puzzle device is Rubic's cube, in which the user rotates sections of a cube, each of which is composed of smaller cubes of different colors, in order to align the smaller cubes such that each side of the larger cube is of a single color. The disadvantage of such mechanical devices is that they are intrinsically limited to one type of problem to solve.
Electronic puzzle devices have the advantage of being more flexible and capable of including many different types of patterns or problems to solve, since these devices have memories which can store more than one type of problem or configuration of the puzzle. One example of a prior art electronic puzzle device is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,417,425, which has an array of lights that can either be turned on or off. In this device, the state of a light (either on or off), is changed when that light is selected by pressing, for example. However, selecting one light can lead to changes in the state (either on or off) of other lights, according to a preset pattern. The puzzle is solved by turning off all the lights. Thus, the user must find the correct sequence of selections to solve the puzzle.
However, this prior art electronic device, although an improvement over the prior art mechanical puzzle devices, is still lacking in many respects. For example, the array of lights is on a flat surface and each light is selected individually, so there is no manipulation of the game through two or three dimensional space, which was one of the attractions of the typical mechanical puzzle device. Thus, although the prior art electronic device of U.S. Pat. No. 5,417,425 represents an improvement, it is still lacking in many respects.
There is therefore a need for, and it would be useful to have, an electronic puzzle device which involves manipulations through two or three dimensional space.